The current projects seminar runs on Mondays in the philosophy common room at the University of Sydney from 1.00-2.30. The common room is in the philosophy department in the main quad. The common room is located roughly where the information icon is on this map of the campus.

For anyone who cannot make a particular seminar and is interested in the paper, the email addresses of the presenters are listed below after their names. Please contact them directly to see if they are happy to provide a copy of the paper. 

Papers are 35 minutes long with 55 minutes discussion. The aim is to keep papers short and punchy and have plenty of time for discussion. So from 2009 we will be implementing the new zero tolerance policy for over-long papers!

We welcome both “current projects” as well as completed works of art, though our emphasis is on the former. To keep things relatively informal we DO NOT allow overhead projection, though you can print out handouts or use the whiteboard. While we welcome papers from a range of areas, technicality should be kept to a minimum and papers made as accessible as possible.

Anyone interested in giving a paper should contact me at: kristie_miller@yahoo.com

There is a lot of competition for slots, so from now on we will only be accepting unsolicited papers from professional philosophers and those affiliated with the centre for time. Amongst those affiliated with the University of Sydney, strong preference will then be given to those who are regular attendees at the seminar, and to papers that are likely to be of broad interest to regular seminar attendees.

Below is a tentative timetable for the current projects seminar for first semester 2009.  Titles and abstracts will be added as they become available.

Feb 16        John Lamont, ACU

                    Email: JLamont@cis.catholic.edu.au

     

                    The Eleatic Principle

The paper looks at a strong form of the Eleatic Principle, the form according to which all real properties are causal properties. Defenders of versions of this strong form, like George Molnar and Alexander Bird, have not really done justice to the force of the objections that have been given to it. These objections are disentangled and clarified, and three of them are identified as being good ones. These objections require a rejection of the 'dispositional monism' or 'pure powers' view held by Bird. An alternative form of the Eleatic Principle is then

proposed that is not vulnerable to these objections.

                    

Feb  23        Mike Titelbaum, ANU/ UC Berkeley

                     Email: titelbaum@gmail.com

                   Feigning Indifference

Suppose you're certain that you're in one of two subjectively indistinguishable situations associated with the same possible world, but you're uncertain which one you're in.  Adam Elga has proposed adding to the theory of rational credence an indifference principle on which you should be equally confident that you're in either.  I will show that no additional principle is needed: Instances of Elga's principle follow directly from a theory I recently proposed for updating credences in context-sensitive claims.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that among these instances are cases that arise under the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, and in those cases Elga's principle contradicts the requirements of the Born Rule. 

Mar 2          Kendall Walton,  U Michigan

                    Email: klwalton@umich.edu

       Empathy, Imagination and Phenomenal Concepts

"I propose a way of understanding empathy on which it does not necessarily involve anything like thinking oneself into another’s shoes, or any imagining at all. This account does a better job of explaining the connection between empathetic experiences and the objects of empathy than most traditional ones do. And it helps to clarify the relations among different varieties of empathy and empathy-like experiences, including empathy with fictional characters."

Mar 9           Lionel Shapiro,  U Syd

                    Email: lionel.shapiro@uconn.edu

                                Revenge and Expressibilty

There is a standard objection against purported explanations of how a language L can express the notion of truth in L.  According to this objection, such explanations avoid one paradox (namely the Liar) only to succumb to another of the same kind.  Even if a language can contain its own truth-predicate, we can identify another intelligible notion it cannot express, on pain of contradiction via Liar-like reasoning.  This paper seeks to undermine such “revenge” by bringing to light an unsupported assumption on which it must rest—an assumption about what is required for a language to express a notion.

Mar 16        Owen Maroney, USyd

                    Email: o.maroney@usyd.edu.au

        Incomplete Preorders and Thermodynamic Entropy/ies.

The existence of a global, unique function of state called entropy is the centrepiece of classical thermodynamics.  Its existence is deduced in terms of heat flows into heat baths, or in terms of an adiabatic accessibility relationship. Both of these methods can be instead cast into the form of the existence of a complete preordering on the state space.  Both of the methods are also widely supposed to only be valid for states in thermal equilibrium, connected by thermodynamically reversible paths and ignoring fluctuation phenomena.  Attempting to widen the domain of validity leads to an incomplete preordering.  The result is not a unique entropy function, but a family of entropy functions.  This turns out to be very similar to a recent result on incomplete preference relations in expected utility theory.

Mar 23        Aidan Lyon, USyd 

                    Email: aidanlyon@gmail.com

                      A Third Concept of Probability

Abstract: I argue that we need to identify a third concept of probability that is distinct from chance and credence. (And to be clear from the outset: this third concept of probability is not a concept of logical probability.) I argue that when we look closely at the conceptual role probability plays in some scientific theories, it becomes clear that neither chance nor credence are appropriate to play this role, and so there must be some other concept of probability that is. I then suggest some possible analyses of this third concept of probability.

Mar 30        Peter Menzies, Macquarie Uni 

                    Email: Peter.Menzies@scmp.mq.edu.au

                 

                       When does one causal explanation exclude another?

Some scientists and philosophers assert that the causal explanations of a higher-level science are often displaced by those of a lower-level science. Cognitive scientists and neuroscientists express this view when they claim that folk psychological explanations of behaviour in terms of intentional mental states will be supplanted by causal explanations in terms of subpersonal cognitive or neural states. The view is not uncommon among philosophers too. Jaegwon Kim, for example, expresses this view in his famous Exclusion Argument for the conclusion that non-reductive physicalism is committed to epiphenomenalism. In this paper I examine the general conditions under which one causal explanation displaces or excludes another. I state these conditions precisely in terms of a simple theory of causal explanation and describe some of their surprising consequences.  

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Apr 6           Dominic Murphy USyd

                   Email: d.murphy@usyd.edu.au

Memory, Introspection and Cognition

Since David Armstrong tried it in 1968, various philosophers have sought to naturalise the idea of an 'inner sense' that is responsible for introspective access to our beliefs and desires. I will start by looking at two recent attempts to carry out this project - one by Goldman and one by Stich and Nichols - and argue that they both fail, for different reasons.  Then I will analyse the reason for the failure and suggest that they provide support for Gareth Evans' 1982 treatment of belief self-ascription as simply deliberation about the world. I will look at some of the objections to Evans' ideas and suggest how they can be met. But in the end I'll acknowledge that if this approach is correct, there really is no such thing as introspection at all.

Apr 27        Catharine Abell, Macquarie U

                    Email: Catharine.Abell@scmp.mq.edu.au

Expression, Representation and Interpretation

In this paper, I seek to answer two questions. Firstly, what is it for a representational work to express a psychological state? Secondly, what is the relation between representation and expression? In other words, what role does a work’s representational content play in determining what it expresses, and what role does what it expresses play in determining what it represents? I will first offer an account of expression in the representational arts and then use it to illuminate the relation between representation and expression. I will argue that, while a work’s explicit representational content plays an important role in determining what it expresses, its expressive content plays an important role in determining its representational content, more broadly construed. In particular, I will argue that a work’s expressive content plays an important role in determining what is true in the work.

May 4        Rachael Briggs, USyd

                  Email: rabriggs@MIT.EDU

Two interpretations of the Ramsey Test

According to the Ramsey Test, a person should accept a conditional to the extent that she would accept the consequent on the supposition that the antecedent is true.  There are two apparently attractive ways of interpreting the Ramsey test: one probabilistic, and the other in terms of truth conditions and possible worlds.  Unfortunately, these two interpretations are difficult to combine due to a set of triviality results.  The difficulty remains even when the probabilistic interpretation is adjusted to allow for `local' as well as a `global' readings of certain conditionals.  I suggest that both readings of the Ramsey Test can be fruitfully understood using the concept of a general imaging function.

May 18        John Cusbert ANU

                    Email: john.cusbert@gmail.com

Deference at a distance

Suppose that you want to defer to the opinion of an advisor. How do you do it? You might just mimic his/her credences; but this goes wrong when the objects of those credences are centered. I'll propose a way of dealing with these centering problems, so that you can defer to a distant advisor. I'll also consider a special case: that in which the advisor is your past or future self.

                         

May 25        Dan Haggard USyd

                    Email: danhaggard@swiftdsl.com.au

On semantic arguments

                           

Semantic arguments can be found in all areas of ontology and metaphysics.  Whether the subject is universals, propositions, time, possible worlds, numbers and even objects that don’t exist – there will be someone using a semantic argument to prove their existence.  So why haven’t you heard about them?  I’ll examine the nature of semantic arguments, provide tips for spotting them in the philosophical wild, and consider a methodology for their evaluation.

Jun 1            Stephen Hetherington, UNSW

                      Email: S.Hetherington@unsw.edu.au

CONTRASTIVISM? CONTEXTUALISM? GRADUALISM

There are theories of knowledge - and there are theories of just some features of knowledge. This paper discusses three competing instances of the latter kind of theory - gradualism, contextualism, and contrastivism. The paper endorses gradualism, a theory flowing from a simple idea about knowledge - and a theory with which we might readily supplant contextualism and contrastivism. Gradualism allows differing grades of knowledge, even of the one state of affairs. This is because you can know the state of affairs in more or less detail, more or less fully and extensively.

Jun  15          David Miller Usyd

                       Email: davmille@arts.usyd.edu.au

Let’s be constructive about space and time

Abstract: The concepts of space and time have been important in both philosophy and physics. In physics the main theory about space and time is the theory of relativity (TR). Unusually for a physics theory, TR was proposed by Einstein as a ?principle theory?, i.e. deduced from quite general postulates or principles. Some people have always argued that TR should be a ?constructive theory?, i.e. deduced from specific laws of physics, like (almost) all other areas of physics.  The latter view has been advocated in the recent book by Harvey Brown and is opposed by Michael Janssen and others. In this talk, I want explore the constructive approach to TR and ask whether there are any consequences for our concepts of space and time.  I will suggest that the constructive approach to TR supports the view that that rulers and clocks can function and be understood without the need for a space and a time to be sitting there waiting to be measured by them, i.e. it suggests a non-substantival view of space and time.

Jun 22           Darren Bradley, UBC

                     Email: darrenbr@interchange.ubc.ca

Four Problems about self-locating belief.

This paper gives a unified treatment of the Doomsday Argument, Sleeping Beauty, the Fine-tuning Argument and confirmation in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. All these cases involve self-locating evidence. However, the troublesome feature of these cases is not self-location, but observation selection effects. I explain how observation selection effects operate, why they affect the four problem cases, and how they can be incorporated into confirmation theory. I will defend the Doomsday Argument, the halfer position in Sleeping Beauty, the Fine-tuning Argument and the applicability of confirmation theory to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Jun 29            Nick Huggett U Chicago

                       Email: huggett@uic.edu

Passing Time

Is the peculiar phenomenology of temporal perception (especially in contrast to spatial perception) the direct perception of some intrinsic feature of time, its ‘passing’ say? Supporters of temporal becoming sometimes argue thus. In opposition, I argue that the phenomenology is largely associated with the perception of motion. Thus I describe motion detection according to contemporary cognitive science using apparent motion illusions and neurophysiology, and argue that such brain activity explains the striking phenomenology in question. That is, the alleged experience of time passing is instead (in large part) the experience of things moving. This paper shows that science, not armchair introspection, is needed to understand what experience shows us about time.

Jul 13               Ben Blumsen (National U Singapore)

                           Email: phibrkb@nus.edu.sg

        

Never-Ending Story


Take a strip of paper with ‘once upon a time there’ written on one side and ‘was a story that began’ on the other. Twisting the paper and joining the ends produces John Barth’s story Frame-Tale, which prefixes ‘once upon a time there was a story that began’ to itself. A theory of meaning in English should explain the possibility of understanding Frame-Tale. But standard theories cannot.                  

Jul 20           Jeremy Butterfield, Cambridge

                       Email: b56@hermes.cam.ac.uk       

Identity in logic and metaphysics: some themes

Jul 27            Sarah Sorial, U Wollongong

                       Email: sarahs@uow.edu.au

Free Speech, Autonomy, and the Marketplace of Ideas

My aim in this paper is to examine the marketplace metaphor and the concept of autonomy on which it depends, as it appears in defenses of free speech more generally, and as it is used to argue against sedition laws more specifically. A closer examination of the way in which this concept functions in free speech debates suggests that concept of autonomy can only protect a narrow free speech principle, one that does not necessarily include the seditious libel in question.

Aug 3           Jamie Dreier, Brown

                      Email: James_Dreier@brown.edu

A Failure of Modus Ponens

An argument due to Shakespeare demonstrates how modus ponens can fail when embedded within or-elimination (or reductio ad absurdum). I start with Shakespeare’s example, from a scene in King Henry V, involving conditional evaluations. A second example involves conditional probabilities, with no evaluations. I canvas alternatives to rejecting modus ponens, and offer my own diagnosis.

Aug 10          Aidan Lyon, Usyd

                       Email:aidanlyon@gmail.com>

Mathematical Explanations of Empirical Facts

Aug 17           Elizabeth Schier, U Macquarie

                            Email: lizschier@gmail.com

Connectionism, Content and Mental Causation

At the heart of the problem of mental causation is the concern that multiply realisable functional properties do not have causal powers that are over and above those of their realisers. However a point of fairly universal agreement that often goes unnoticed is that organised wholes have properties that are real and distinct from the properties of their parts. In this paper I argue that the connectionist can avoid the problem of mental causation, at least for representational content, because content is only a property of the organised whole

that is the firing network. So for the connectionist, representational content is real, physical and yet not a property of the entities of micro-physics.

Aug 24            Richard Joyce, USyd

                     Email: richard.joyce@arts.usyd.edu.au

The accidental error theorist

The moral error theorist faces many kinds of opposition. One kind of opponent offers an identity claim between moral properties and certain naturalistic properties. But sometimes the description of the naturalistic properties in question fails even to denote any properties, in which case the would-be moral naturalist is unwittingly championing an error theory. Examples of this mistake are canvassed.

Aug 31            David Braddon-Mitchell, USyd

                       Email: dbm@mail.usyd.edu.au

                                    Cancelled

Sep 7               Lenny Moss (Exeter)

                       Email: Lenny.Moss@exeter.ac.uk

Meta-reflections on ‘The Philosophy of Biology,’ New Challenges from Biology and a Theory of ‘Natural Detachment’.

As a sub-discipline within philosophy ‘The Philosophy of Biology’ is a very young field which is still highly influenced by the proclivities of its founding members.  It is no secret that practicing philosophers of biology have taken a particular interest in matters relating to the ‘principle’ of natural selection.  There are various reasons, or explanations, why this has been the case, but these would not include the fact it reflects the interests of most working biologist (which it doesn’t).  A positive explanation might be the belief that there are no properties of the living state as such that can’t ultimately be understood in terms of natural selection.  This question will be further explored by considering possible challenges from new developments within biology such as theories of facilitated variation, adaptive developmental recombination, comparative genomics, and my proposal for a theory of ‘natural detachment.’

Sep 14             Raamy Majeed (USyd)

                        Email: raamy@yahoo.com

Functionalism & Qualia Eliminativism

One of the main objections to a functionalist account of the phenomenal character of experience or qualia is that functionalism simply eliminates the way our experiences seem to us as opposed to giving an account of it. The typical functionalist reply to fend off this objection has been to restate their case again, albeit in more detail. This strategy hasn’t proved as successful as functionalists would like as skepticism about qualia-functionalism still looms. This paper aims to defend functionalism by taking a different approach. It attempts to tease out the intuitions that motivate the eliminativist objection to functionalism and then determine whether these intuitions themselves are justified. I argue that these intuitions remain unjustified and therefore the eliminativist objection driven by these intuitions carry no weight.

Sep 21            Gianluigi Oliveri

                      Email: gianluigi.oliveri@unipa.it

For a philosophy of mathematical practice

It is a fact that of the logicist, the intuitionist, and Hilbert's programmes, the classical programmes set up to establish mathematics on safe foundations, some have failed, whereas others have long since lost their propulsive force.Two of the consequences of the crisis of the classical programmes in the foundations of mathematics were: a widespread scepticism

towards the possibility of establishing the certainty of mathematical methods, and  a new attention paid to mathematical practice. The main aim of this article is that of individuating some directions of research along which to develop a tenable philosophyof mathematical practice.

Sept 28        Dan Marshall, ANU

                   Email: dan.marshall@anu.edu.au

The Temporal Comparison Argument for Presentism

Presentism is the thesis that every existing thing presently exists. In this paper I will give an argument for presentism, which is based on the role `presently' plays in making comparisons between what is the case and what was or will be the case. I will then discuss a number of responses to this argument. I will argue that each of these responses either fails or involves a high theoretical cost.

Oct 12       David Braddon-Mitchell, USyd

                 Email: dbm@mail.usyd.edu.au

Is That all there Is?

We can explain a lot about why philosophers vary in their attraction to various views about discourses - whether they be realists, eliminativists, expressivists, prescriptivists, deflationists and so on - naturalistically. The idea is that sometimes, when we learn what is governing our talk in some area, our response is "is that all there is?". We vary in how likely we are to respond that way, and the world varies in how likely it is to aid that response in different areas. Equally importantly, we vary in how  we respond to the thought that that's all there is. In this talk I'll sketch this story, and maybe have time to ask a meta-question: Is that all there is?

Oct 19       Jamin Asay, UNC

                Email: asay@email.unc.edu

Three Paradigms of Scientific Realism

Advocates of truthmaker theory think that the enterprise of offering truthmakers for the truths we accept is a useful regimentation of ontological investigation. While truthmaking has been brought to bear on several topics inside core metaphysics (presentism, universals, modality),

it has not yet been applied to metaphysical questions that arise in other domains of philosophy. In this talk, I want to explore what insights truthmaker theory can provide for the debate over scientific realism. Accordingly, I consider three different approaches to scientific realism. There is the truth-mongering approach that defines the debate over realism in terms of the theory of truth. There is the methodological approach that defines the debate in terms of the aim of science. And there is the theoretic approach that defines the debate in terms of how scientific theories are to be interpreted. My contention is that truthmaking (1) helps us see how the truth-mongering approach is a non-starter, (2) clarifies what is at stake in the theoretical approach, and (3) remains neutral on the methodological approach.

Oct 26       Mark Jago, Macq

                Email: mark.jago@gmail.com

Grounding ontic vagueness

The received wisdom is that, if vagueness is anything other than our ignorance of the facts, then we'd better give up on classical logic; and if vagueness has its source in the world, as opposed to our imprecise language, then we'd better give up on classical logic in a big way. But there's a line of thought on which you can have ontic vagueness and keep classical logic: every sentence is either true or false, but sometimes it's indeterminate which. Here I'll argue that, at least on one understanding of what ontic vagueness would be—cashed out in terms of the world making some statement indeterminate—the idea isn't coherent. So if there is any ontic vagueness (so understood), we have to give up on classical logic after all.

Nov 2      Luke Russell, Usyd

               Email: luke.russell@usyd.edu.au

Evil persons and evil feelings

It is plausible that someone who is strongly and fixedly disposed to perform evil actions is an evil person. But what about someone who takes intense pleasure in witnessing and contemplating extreme suffering? Can evil feelings, independent of evil actions, be sufficient for evil personhood? How should we evaluate sadistic voyeurs, malevolent quadriplegics,self-loathing perverts and unrepentant former evildoers.

Nov 9      Mark Colyvan, Usyd

                Email: mcolyvan@usyd.edu.au

Recent Work in Formal Social Epistemology

Nov 16    John Wilkins Usyd

                 Email: john.s.wilkins@gmail.com

      

The evolution of religion

My present research is in the arena of naturalistic accounts of religion in terms of evolved capacities and behaviours, and the philosophical implications that follow from them. One example, set by Plantinga, is whether evolutionary theory itself suffers from a tu quoque if evolution can be seen as debunking religion by making it a natural property. I am also considering the kinds of biological inferences that constrain speculation about naturalistic accounts of religion, such as the use of phylogenetic inference to overcome some of the shortfalls of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

The nature of deities themselves as "super-stimulus" human-style agents, proposed by several anthropologists and comparative psychologists, is also interesting. The role of gods in religion is multifaceted, and may involve both psychological and political considerations, such as social psychology and dominance behaviours.

Nov 23    James Ley Usyd

                    TBA

Nov 31    Peter Bowden

                Email: peterbowden@ozemail.com.au

Why moral philosophers should not teach ethics

An alternate title to this paper is 'An Appeal to Moral Philosophers', an appeal which asks that they incorporate into their teaching a range of empirical findings on ethical practices. Either title raises questions on what defines moral philosophy and whether it includes research findings. Other questions are what are the more significant findings?   Also whether current teaching includes these findings now, and if it doesn’t should it? The first question is answered by documenting statements by LaFollette, Singer and other philosophers today, and Nowell-Smith a half-century ago. Despite some inevitable disagreements, the paper develops a conditional statement that empirical findings are a necessary component of a course on ethics. The more significant of these findings starts with now convincing research that determines that most effective way to identify a wrong is through the views of those who are aware of it, and willing to say so. A second is Daniel Dennett’s assertion that having rules works somewhat; but more particularly the research on how those rules might be effectively developed and framed. A third is the exponential growth in structures and responsibilities that are now being used to institutionalise ethical practices The content of current teaching is determined by examining what journals of moral philosophy contain; on the basis that philosophers write about what they teach; and assuming that if they do not write about empirical research, they do not teach it.The final paragraphs explore the concept of how the research could be incorporated with other views on teaching ethics.